The Very Best of Fenland Smallholders Club

My weekend was devoted to Fenland Smallholders Club.

Saturday 17th November 2018
Our first Beginners Grow Your Own Group
Once a month for the next ten months I am leading a Beginners' Grow Your Own Group. Today was our first meeting.
Before we got started on my tour of the veg plot, the orchard, the soft-fruit area and the nuttery, I had a plan to get our caravan moved. We had parked it up on the gravel driveway and Sue and I just couldn't get it moved on our own. Many hands made light work.
We hope to use this caravan to house volunteers if we can attract them to spend time here on the smallholding with us.

I am initially running the BGYO group as a ten session course and hope to give people all the skills they need to become pretty much self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables (unless they fancy the odd banana and orange!)
There are a range of participants, all smallholders, ranging from complete novices who are about to embark on setting up for growing food to others who have been doing it for years but want to extend their activities.

For this first session I tried to focus on the big picture such as choosing a site, deciding how to arrange beds and where to place perennial and annual beds. We looked at issues such as water supply, placing sheds, climate and microclimate and options for indoor growing.

Time flew past. I fed everybody with a couple of soups I had knocked up using one of my many pumpkins and bade farewell.

I still had some of the afternoon and evening to embark on my first ever basket-making without a tutor to guide me. I started with a basic basket which I had made before on courses. I made a couple of beginner mistakes, but overall the techniques came back to me. In fact, without a tutor to rely on I learned a lot more when I had to figure things out for myself.

It's all coming back to me now

I would dearly love to have another go straight away, but unfortunately the willow needs soaking for several days.

Sunday 18th November 2018
Preserving Day




Sunday was the main Smallholders Club meeting, for which Sue had done most of the organisation. We set off early and managed to get into the village hall in good time to set everything up. The day started with a talk by Sue on using a dehydrator. Her notes for the talk were on the equivalent of an old-fashioned fag packet, much to the amusement of others. Sometimes our teaching skills come in very useful.

After the talk there were about ten tables covering all aspects of preserving which club members kindly ran. There was onion stringing, eco-wraps, fermenting, jam and chutney, freezing, vinegars and cordials, bottling, sausage-making... everything you could want to know. We also had a jam-swap, which with hindsight I should have named the Jam-boree. This worked really well and will become an annual occurrence.

Lastly the pumpkin soup left from yesterday made a very popular appearance on the refreshments stand, alongside cakes, pizza and cheese scones which others had brought along. That one Crown Prince squash, with just a few onions and leeks and a small packet of sweet potato, had made three large pans of soup and provided about twenty five warming lunches. It had made a fair bit of money for the club too. 

One particular nice moment was to see Steve, a professional gardener, mentoring one of our younger members in the art of onion stringing. A bonus for Sue and I too as we got all our onions strung and all our garlic plaited. And that was that. 


A very busy weekend which hopefully lots of people learned a lot from and enjoyed.